Dan Fitzpatrick offers a useful mental model for thinking through the impact of artificial intelligence on education: Will it mostly support “linear” innovations, like automated tutors or teacher assistants, that help existing schools do what they already do?
Or will it allow “nonlinear” innovations—fundamentally new, different and hopefully better approaches to teaching and learning that may look far different from existing schools?
Historically, in public-education, non-linear innovations have had nowhere to go. Most of the nearly $900 billion of purchasing power in public education is controlled by existing schools and districts.
They offer a substantial market for makers of tools that promise to help them do what they’re already doing more efficiently. They don’t offer a market for alternatives, like Math Academy, a $49-per-month AI-powered math platform, that perform one of the many jobs schools typically do (teaching students math), in a format that ensures every student is working exactly on their level.
The result is an education system that, in the words of MIT’s Justin Reich, tends to domesticate new technologies rather than embrace new technologies that change the way it operates.
Alternative approaches, and tools that enable them, get relegated to the margins, or wind up serving small slices of mostly affluent parents who purchase them out of pocket to supplement what their schools provide.
Now, though, education savings accounts are changing the equation. As Michael Horn describes:
With an ESA, families get an allotment of dollars in, yes, a savings account, from which they can spend it on a variety of educational products and services. These range from schools to classes to tutoring to lessons, therapy, educational products and more. If you don’t spend the money in a given year, that’s OK, because you can rollover the savings for future use.
As a result, now we’re not just talking about students choosing different schools or educational options. Instead, families have an incentive to consider the relative value of different educational goods and services, make tradeoffs, and choose accordingly.
That opens up the market for a variety of school types priced differently and for families to factor pricing in their decision-making as they choose the right mix of services for them.As ESAs grow, this creates the true conditions for disruptive innovation of schooling because now there is an opportunity for lower-cost educational products and services fueled by technology enablers to enter the market, start among those who are overserved by the full bundle of public schooling, and improve over time.
Homeschoolers and families using education savings accounts are also starting to create a new value network.
Instead of a market where the main buyers and sellers are schools and school systems, they are creating a market where the main buyers are families and the sellers include anyone who can meet a family’s educational need.
If a parent subscribes to Math Academy as their new AI-powered math solution … Where is their kid supposed to go during the day if mom and dad both have to work? What are they doing for English and civics and science?
States like Florida are beginning to proffer answers to that question that look very different from the usual “put the kid on the bus and let the school figure out the details.”
A student could take their Math Academy lessons to a KaiPod location for in-person support, take an Oxford-style Shakespeare tutorial from an approved teacher working in private practice, learn civics in virtual reality, complete a hands-on lab experiment with Eye of a Scientist, and round out their day with a P.E. class at their local public school.
A new wave of education innovators is making this kind of arrangement — and countless other permutations — possible. And they’re starting to build the connective tissue to help make it all logistically feasible for parents and educators.
For those who have spent decades frustrated by innovations that merely tinker with school as we know it, these are exciting times.
In Brief
States and liberal think tanks are complicating efforts to create a new value network with calls to regulate microschools like traditional schools.
Homeschooling is shifting from kitchen tables to co-ops and learning centers—and continues to grow across much of the country. School districts face a choice when students switch to homeschooling: Serve them partially or not at all. In Minnesota, many districts are choosing the former.
Mark Raymond, the superintendent of Dassel-Cokato Public Schools — a district where homeschooling is especially popular — said he’s always looking for ways to partner with the families who homeschool.
“I don’t think there’s a right or wrong decision in education as long as all students are receiving what they need when they need it,” Raymond said. “Sometimes our traditional system doesn’t meet the needs of families or students, and when we can partner with them to offer what we can, that’s great for us.”
Some popular school choice programs, like a voluntary desegregation initiative in Massachusetts, aren’t growing despite strong parent demand.
New data confirm just over 3.6 million American children were born in 2024. That’s a decline of over 700,000 from the 2007 peak. Children born during the peak year are now turning 18 and preparing to graduate high school. Unless trends shift dramatically, the number of K-12 students in the U.S will only decline from here.
From the “positive sum” files: Participating in Ohio’s school voucher program increases a student’s chances of enrolling in and graduating college. And the resulting competition also drives improved outcomes for public-school students.
More parents using Arkansas’ Education Freedom Accounts will have to save their receipts under a new law that caps parent spending on transportation and “extracurricular” or “physical education” activities.
Louisiana lawmakers are putting up a fight over funding for the state’s expanded LA Gator education savings account program.
Texas’s ESA legislation is officially headed to Gov. Abbott. North Dakota’s ESA legislation has been shot down by a veto and is likely dead for the session.
A new report by FutureED embodies some of the current muddled thinking around school accountability. In a laudable effort to seek “broader” measures of school quality, it proposes a mishmash of measurements that mix inputs and outcomes.
Strong accountability policies played a crucial role in the “Southern Surge”— in which academic results in the Southeast are gaining or holding steady academically while others are falling.
An underrated challenge for the future (and present) of education: Identity verification. AI bots are applying to community colleges in attempts by fraudsters to pocket Pell Grant funding.
Parent Corner
Every school has an 8 a.m. – 3 p.m. strategy. But do you, or your school, have a 6 p.m. – midnight strategy?
What kids do — or don’t do — during those hours can have major bearing on their success from 8-3.
